Search This Blog

Wednesday, 30 January 2008

A country churchyard

Most churches and churchyards in the county have multiple memorials of one sort or another. That at Whicham, a little chapel tucked beneath the slopes of Black Combe, has more than most.

Best known perhaps for having the grave of Tom Mayson, a local man who won the Victoria Cross at Passchendaele in 1917, it hosts a number of other memorials that illustrate the ubiquity of loss in the conflicts of the twentieth century.

Three unknown merchant seamen are buried here, their place marked with Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones. Two of them share a common grave and must have been found on the beach off Silecroft on the same day in April 1941. They are a stark reminder of the Battle of the Atlantic during which long campaign over 50,000 merchant seamen of many nations perished, their bodies occassionally thrown up by the ocean and given anonymous burial. The courage, commitment & tenacity of those remarkable men is rarely acknowledged.

Next to this are two further CWGC headstones marking the graves of two Australian airmen, 27 year old Corporal Clifford Amos of South Australia & A/C John Francis aged 22 of New South Wales. Both were crew members of a Short Sunderland flying boat of number 10 squadron RAAF that came down in the sea off Anglesey. Their bodies were washed up at Silecroft some time later.

On the south side of the church is a plot belonging to the Caddy - Huddlestone family that contains a family headstone and two more CWGC graves. The earlier war grave is that of Private Tom Caddy who, having served with the Machine Gun Corps, died of the effects of gas poisoning in March 1920. The later one is that of his nephew, Sgt Tom Huddlestone, Wireless Operator/Air Gunner, RAF, who died on October 2, 1944 aged 19. On the family headstone is the name of Annie May Huddlestone, nee Caddy, sister of one, mother of the other.

Inside the church are three memorials, one each for the world wars and a copy of the citation for Tom Mayson's VC. The orginal was, unbelievably, stolen in the early 1990s.

1 comment:

A guy on the great war forum going by the name of 'Northern Soul', added the following. ..... There are some references to men killed in the war on various civil headstones in there but I have done a bit of digging on the 3 x Merchant Navy men. They all washed up at the same time, in mid-April, but the two found at Silecroft were buried more or less straight away while the one found further down the coast at Haverigg was not buried until July for some unknown reason. What it does give us is a possibly sinking to tie the casuallties to - the SS Brier Rose which vanished in the Irish Sea on March 26th, 1941 on a voyage between Belfast and Cardiff with a cargo of steel billets. It is assumed she was sunk by enemy action although her loss has not been linked to any known submarine attack. Captain Williams and nine other crew were killed. The date of sinking and the location would mean that bodies would wash up on the South Cumberland coast after a fortnight or so - c.f. Amos and Francis (who crashed off Bardsey Island rather than Anglesey). Of course, I can't prove any of this.............

A gentle jaunt through a poignant aspect of Cumbria's history.

Longsleddale Memorial Sundial

Longsleddale sundial & others

There are many war memorials in Cumbria. The United Kingdom National Inventory of War Memorials at the Imperial War Museum lists over 800 in the county but this is a gross underestimate. There are perhaps two or three thousand commemorating conflicts from the middle ages to Iraq & Afghanistan. They take every imaginable form.

This occasional blog describes some of the the finer points of memorial watching and some of my own thoughts on what they seem to say. Please leave comments; I have learnt a lot from peoples observations and memories.

Memorials are of a specific time - they pose many questions; about the validation of war, of death and remembrance and of ever morphing ideas of community or nationhood.

I'm not precious about the pics - they are there for all - download them as you will.

I have used illustrations and info from all over the web and elsewhere. If I have not acknowledged the source or infringed copyright I apologise. Let me know and I will make amends as best I can.

On more recent postings links to associated or interesting websites are highlighted in the text

Me & this

Following a rather dizzy hippy life in Northumberland in the 60s when I somehow got a degree in Fine Art I embarked on a career in the civil service which soon died a natural death. After a further period as a restaurateur I went to Lancaster and got a degree in Independent Studies followed by a Master's Degree in Historical Research. Now retired I do what interests me - history! And that means, among other things, war memorials - an excuse to explore the wonderful county of Cumbria; its towns, villages & churches & people.